I first heard Peter Gabriel's music about four years ago on the radio when his very famous love song "In Your Eyes" was played late one summer night. Apart from the straight up love song that it was, what floored me was how he had managed to seamlessly weave soaring vocals of the Senegalese musician Yousoou N' Dour into that track. This transformed what would have been a love ballad that one routinely hears on the radio into a marker that would remain embedded in one's internal soundscape, to which one will return to often. So check out a similar live version of this song. This is another live version (and Part 2) performed during the Amnesty International "Human Rights Now" tour way back in 1988, which also features L. Shankar playing the violin. And finally , this version features Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

What I also like about Gabriel's music are the points of departure it offers to someone who wants to explore sonic geographies. Take the collaborations between Gabriel and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or Baaba Mal (who also can be heard on the soundtrack of "Black Hawk Down") in the excellent soundtrack for the movie "The Last Temptation of Christ" - someone who might have been totally unaware of the mode of esctactic singing either Fateh Ali Khan or Baaba Maal embody can use the music in this album to venture into South Asian qawaali or African music.

"Shaking The Tree" is another collaboration between Yousoou and Gabriel that I liked. Also thanks to Gabriel, I also discovered the silken singing of Salif Ketia. Gabriel also shows up in the soundtrack of the movie, "The City of Angels", with this digre like song, "I Grieve".